The possibility of flexibly retrieving our memories using a first-person or a third-person perspective (1PP or 3PP) has been extensively investigated in episodic memory research. Here, we used a Virtual Reality-based paradigm to manipulate the visual perspective used during the encoding stage to investigate age-related differences in the formation of memories experienced from 1PP vs. 3PP. 32 young adults and 32 seniors participated in the study. Participants navigated through two virtual cities to encode complex real-life virtual events, from either a 1PP (as if from their egocentric viewpoint) or a 3PP, while actively controlling an avatar. While recognition accuracy was higher in young adults after encoding in 1PP compared to 3PP, there was no benefit in memory formation in 1PP for older adults. These findings are discussed in terms of both age-related changes in episodic memory functioning and self-referencing processes.

使用第一人称或第三人称视角（1PP 或 3PP）灵活检索记忆的可能性在情景记忆研究中已得到广泛研究。在这里，我们使用基于虚拟现实的范例来操纵编码阶段使用的视觉视角，以研究 1PP 与 3PP 经历的记忆形成中与年龄相关的差异。32 名年轻人和 32 名老年人参与了这项研究。参与者在两个虚拟城市中导航，从 1PP（仿佛从他们以自我为中心的角度）或 3PP 编码复杂的现实生活虚拟事件，同时主动控制化身。虽然与 3PP 相比，1PP 编码后年轻人的识别准确度更高，但 1PP 编码对老年人的记忆形成没有任何好处。这些发现从情景记忆功能和自我参照过程中与年龄相关的变化方面进行了讨论。